


A Song for When

by TheMouthKing



Category: Rhett & Link
Genre: Episode Related, Feelings, Idiots in Love, Kissing, M/M, Mutual Pining, when in doubt scream your feelings at your best friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-01 20:57:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19185403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMouthKing/pseuds/TheMouthKing
Summary: During a sound check for the Noise Cancelling Headphones Challenge, Rhett jumps at a chance that presents itself.





	A Song for When

**Author's Note:**

  * For [annabelle_leigh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/annabelle_leigh/gifts).



> Huge thanks to @usefulmammal(Tumblr)/annabelle_leigh(AO3) for both enabling me with this fic, and hashing it out with me (and reading through it once it was done). I likely wouldn't write a freaking thing without the most useful of mammals by my side. :)
> 
> Another huge thanks goes to missingparentheses (tumblr/AO3) for betaing. Thanks for catching my endless sentences.
> 
> Inspired by [GMMore #1553.](https://youtu.be/_4m6nLWulL4)

They’re alone, just the two of them and Stevie, doing a sound check for the upcoming S’More. Normally a dry run like this would be done with some of the crew as stand ins to iron out the wrinkles, but this particular bit needs the two of them. They’ve got to run through it a little, get the volume right so they make sure they really can’t hear each other, but also ensure they don’t blow out their eardrums during filming. 

Stevie’s at her spot, DJing the two output sources that are pumping sweet, sweet royalty free music into the guys’ over the ear headphones. Everyone has explicit directions. They’re gonna bang this out in ten minutes tops. 

“Can you hear me?” Link’s talking too loud, glancing back and forth between Rhett and across the room at Stevie. 

“I can hear you,” Rhett answers a little too loudly, the music in his ears causing him to raise his voice in spite of the fact that he can still hear Link over it. “Can you hear me?” A pause, a laugh, “Can you hear me now?”

Of course he’s quoting that Verizon ad. 

“You can hear me. Oh, no, wait, I can’t hear you anymore.” Link turns to Stevie. “I can’t hear him!”

Stevie interrupts Link’s royalty free music with commentary through her mic line: “Don’t yell, you’re gonna get reverb and people are gonna think he can hear you.”

“Oh. Stevie says I shouldn’t scream,” Link yells at Rhett. 

“You want ice cream?” Rhett asks, honed in on Link’s face. On his mouth, trying to read his lips, to know what it is he’s saying. Trying to drown out the bad wannabe rock music pumping its way into his brain with the work of deciphering what Link’s trying to say. 

“Don’t scream. I’m gonna talk like this.” Link’s modulated his voice, which Stevie is surely thankful for, but Rhett doesn’t know the difference. 

“You what? You wanna fish? I can’t hear you, man.”

Link just shakes his head and blinks at Rhett, confused. After a beat, he gestures with his hands to say _nevermind_ and says, “Try and tell me something.”

“Yelling,” Rhett ventures a guess, and raises his eyebrows to place a question mark non-verbally where there wasn’t one verbally, because he’s as disconnected from his own voice like this as he is from Link’s. 

“Tell me _something._ ” Link talks slower this time, but Rhett’s vacant stare tells him it’s not getting through. Link looks at Stevie for help, and she hits a button and interrupts Rhett’s music to give him instructions. 

“He wants you to try and tell him something, so he can guess what you’re trying to say. Try and tell him a message, see how it goes.”

“Oh, a _message._ ” Rhett gets it now. But what’s he going to say? The music is messing with him, and his mind is blank but for the lyrics rattling around in his skull. He’s tempted to try and relay the lyrics to Link, but that feels dumb. 

“Message. Yeah, man! Message me.” Link catches that much, echoes it back. 

Rhett’s attention is on Link’s mouth again. Has been through this thing so far, as much as he can stand it to be. Maybe that’s why he’s doing so badly at it, because he keeps looking away. Because if he just keeps looking at Link’s mouth, he’s going to do even worse than he already is. 

Because he’s going to be thinking not about reading his lips, but about other things his mouth can do. _There’s_ an idea. A terrible idea, but an idea nonetheless. Link can’t hear him and Stevie’s the only other soul in the studio. And he knows she wouldn’t breathe a word, wouldn’t dare. It’s almost as safe as it’ll ever be. Or maybe he’s just stupider than he’s ever been. 

All Rhett knows suddenly is that it’s now or never. 

“I want to kiss you.” Rhett’s heart is beating hard in his chest, and he’d hear it hammering in his throat if not for the heavy bass of the royalty free music. 

“You’re a cashew?”

There’s a real and terrifying moment where Rhett thinks maybe Link had heard him correctly, that he’s echoing back what he’d said accurately. But the expression on his face doesn’t match the gravity that would be there if that were true, the probable disgust, the laughing it off.

“I’ve wanted to kiss you since the ninth grade.” Rhett’s steadfastly not looking at Stevie because he _can’t._ He can’t look at her pitying him for feeling this way, for realizing it too late, for being pathetic enough to wait until Link can’t hear a damn thing to say anything about it. Can’t make eye contact with her knowing that they both know that his endgame isn’t an endgame at all, but just a selfish excuse to say the words without the consequences of saying them. 

“You have to piss in the Everglades?” Link’s eyebrows squinch up and he’s got his full attention locked on Rhett. 

There’s a sick thrill Rhett gets in exposing this vulnerable part of himself now where it can’t be heard, where it can’t hurt him. It’s like screaming into the void, like writing an angry letter to God and releasing it to the sky tied to the end of a balloon. Maybe if he gets it out, he can let go. 

Maybe if he lets go, it won’t control him anymore.

“Sometimes I wanna touch you so bad I could cry.”

“Yeah, I like pie.” Link blinks at him and his attention falters, flickers over to Stevie and comes to settle back on Rhett, on his face. His mouth. 

“I should be grateful for what we’ve got, but sometimes I look at our names together and… and I wonder what might have happened.” Link can’t hear him he doesn't think, and he’s talking too fast for him to read his lips, but it doesn’t stop his voice from catching in his throat. 

He’d go on about the multiverse, about how he wonders if there’s some version of them in some universe where they’re together, where they’re happy. Where it didn’t tear the fabric of their worlds apart, where they got to have each other and not lose their families or this. Where they got to have it all. He’d ramble about all that and more, but even though he’s doing his absolute best to pretend she’s not, he knows Stevie is right there. That she can hear every last damning word, and there’s a difference between outing himself under the thin veil of royalty free music and turning himself entirely inside out and laying every shred of feeling he has bare.

Not much, but there _is_ a difference, and he’ll toe the line. 

Link looks confused, but before he has a chance to grow suspicious, the shorter man opens his mouth and parrots something back that Rhett can’t understand with the music blaring. 

“I don’t wanna lose what we have — I’m terrified of losing what we’ve got — but sometimes I can’t help but imagine what we’d have if… if I wasn’t such a coward.”

Link’s staring back at him in silence, not echoing back his best guess of a bad lip-reading. He looks a little lost and a lot younger than his forty-one years in spite of his salt and pepper hair and laugh lines that give him away. 

Rhett almost suspects, _almost_ , but he’s also wrapped up in the relief and the thrill of letting this thing he’s kept caged in his chest out that he can’t see the warning signs. He’s in his own head, overthinking, moving too fast to catch on that Link actually _can_ hear him. 

(Little does he know, Stevie turned Link’s volume way down at some point and came in on his line to tell him to play it cool, to pretend he still can’t hear. To listen in and pretend he isn’t.)

“—if I’d kissed you any one of the thousands of times I wanted to.”

There’s no pretending after that, no amount of acting that can keep having heard those words off his face. Link’s jaw just drops open and he sits there, frozen, struck stupid by Rhett’s words. That’s when the panic sets in, when Rhett’s blood runs cold. When it feels like the bottom drops out, like he’s falling without ground to catch or mercifully kill him. _Oh God, how much had he heard?_

Rhett didn’t have air or sound left to ask it, but the answer seems to come just the same: _Enough._

Maybe Link hadn’t heard it all, hadn’t heard every single traitorous word, but he’d heard enough. More than enough to fill in the blanks. Rhett doesn’t have to guess to figure it out, to solve the mystery, to know that Stevie compromised the sound check. Had let him out himself. 

He doesn’t feel anything beyond that initial shock of disbelief, of betrayal, the urge to recoil. To retreat back into himself and never come out again, but before that self-destructive urge gets the chance to take hold, Link surges forward and Rhett is taken with another wave of shock and disbelief. 

This time it’s because Link’s kissing him. Awkwardly colliding into him with the full force of more than twenty years of longing, fingers already tangled up in Rhett’s coiled headphones cable in his hurry to get them off him. To make it so Rhett could hear him so they didn’t have to rely on sight to communicate. 

But the very second he drops Rhett’s headphones on the desk beside them he does exactly that. He breathes the words that come next against Rhett’s wet mouth, makes him feel more than hear what he has to say. Makes him fill in the gaps. 

_“I love you.”_

**Author's Note:**

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